Ross Levatter wrote a long reply to an earlier post of mine. David Henderson mistakenly approves. Thought experiments, how do they work?

Despite Levatter’s lengthy reply, the issue here is really simple. All I’m asking is what role consequences play in our thinking about the justification of markets. Even though we know markets are good, we political philosophers–we people who ask what justifies various institutions–want to know just what it would mean if markets had different consequences than they in fact have. So, I’m just asking whether people would still support markets if the empirical claims of Marxist economics (or, if you’d like, more anti-market mainstream economics) were true. Henderson and Levatter are right that the issue is not actually about economics. I’m not disputing any economics with them. Instead, it’s about how the facts of economics bear on the moral justification of market institutions. And the way we determine that is to ask what would follow, from a moral point of view, if the facts were different from what they are.

As a matter of fact, central planning is not efficient. Not even close. But what if, thanks to newfangled alien technology, central planning could be made to work much better than market economies? If so, should we switch to central planning?

As a matter of fact, people feel pain and can die. What if they didn’t feel pain and couldn’t die? How would this affect our moral obligations to one another?

As a matter of fact, people do not choose their sexual orientation. What if they did? What if they could? (What if we invented a pill that switched you?) Would that change anything about the morality of sex?

As a matter of fact, free trade is good in the long run for most people. What if the protectionists’ arguments were right? What if those special, bizarre circumstances where protectionism works better than free trade (which we all covered in our advanced econ classes) were more widespread? Would we still favor free trade on purely deontological grounds?

As a matter of fact, Loki is wrong when he suggests, in the Avengers, that human beings would be better off subjugated and serving a god-like dictator. But what if Loki were right, and people were better off (happier, etc.) being subjugated rather than being free?

As a matter of fact, the best way to promote positive liberty is to protect negative liberty. But what if it turned out that positive liberty and negative liberty were in conflict, as many hard leftists believe?

As a matter of fact, there is no dark side of the Force. And there is no One Ring. Or Ring of Gyges. But if there were, would it ever be permissible to use them?

As a matter of fact, the empirical claims of Marxist economics are wrong, usually wildly wrong. And the empirical claims of mainstream economics are for the most part right, or close to true. But what if the opposite were true, as is logically possible*? How would that affect the justification of markets?

I have not been arguing that markets have bad consequences. I have not been disputing any mainstream econ. Rather, I’m just pointing out to a bunch of libertarians that they implicitly believe something that many of them explicitly deny: if libertarian institutions had terrible consequences, but social democracy had wonderful consequences, this would at the very least be a strong if not decisive count against libertarian institutions and in favor of social democracy, and it might even be decisive in favor of social democracy. But, of course, this needs spelling out, as we’d need to know more about just why libertarian institutions fail and social democracy works. But, here, we can spell that out quickly–just imagine that, say, Robert Frank’s or Jeffrey Sachs’s empirical claims about the economy were true, and that, say, my conflicting views about the economy were false.

I’m not saying that consequentialism is true. Consequentialism moral theories say that consequences are the only thing that matters. Instead, I’m just relying on the commonsense claim that consequences matter. The overwhelming majority of deontological moral theories, including Kantianism, Rossianism, eudaimonism, virtue theories, etc., hold that consequences matter.

Now, some libertarians think asking “What would say about markets if they tended to have disastrous consequences?” is like asking, “What would you say if 2+2=5?”  But that’s a really silly comparison. 2+2=4 in all possible worlds. It’s logically impossible for 2+2 to equal anything other than 4. But economics–or, at least, economics used to defend actual, existing institutions–is empirical, and so relies upon contingent rather than necessary truths.**

*P.S., for the extreme apriorist Austrians: A priori ≠ necessary ≠ analytic truth. “X is an a priori truth” makes a claim about epistemology, not about metaphysics or about semantics. So, even if I grant you, as I of course don’t, that good economics is a priori, this doesn’t invalidate my claim here.

**N.B. Many economic models are developed  a priori, as an exercise in mathematical deduction. An econ paper might start with some assumptions and then draw out the implications of those assumptions to construct a model M. But any claim of the sort “The behavior of this actual existing institution in the world is best explained by M” is an empirical claim. We can construct models a priori, but linking those models to actual stuff out there in the world is not a priori.